Elizabeth
by solusadvictimam
Summary: Another prototype child mecha is assigned for testing to a Cybertronics director and his bored and frustrated wife. The first chapter of a story to be continued. Please read and review.
1. Helena, Thomas, and nursery daydreams

Mrs. Foster's writing was beginning to pall. Her hand-written manuscripts, page after page filled with line after line of neat, flowery script, sat on the shelves of her husband's study, slim volumes, set upright between "Forster", and Mr. Foster's university thesis. A collection of short stories, an anthology of six month's poetry, and a brief novella represented the fruit of the author's latest hobby. But now the fruit was dying, rotting, palling.  
  
Mrs. Foster was seated in her conservatory when her husband returned home from the office. Examining a fleshy rose blossom between carefully manicured fingers, she recalled her passion for raising hothouse flowers, so recently abandoned. The beautiful flowers were tended now by Timothy, the gardener, who also had responsibility for the table groaning with the weight of the bonsai trees his mistress had spent the greater part of the last year cultivating before moving on to yet another pastime, allowing the plants to collapse into their natural, apathetic, limp and unattractive state. Mr. Foster was greeted in the hall by Anna, who hung his coat and hat and scarf and gloves with gentle care, and conducted him to his wife in the vast, glittering glass edifice beyond the drawing room. Helena was sprawled petulantly on a wicker sofa, her knees curled beneath her, her nimble fingers systematically destroying the blossom, sprinkling curling petals across the tiled floor. Her husband was smiling.  
  
As dusk settled over Mrs. Foster's garden, the couple made their way from the chilling conservatory to the warmth and pooled light of the house's interior, to perch on a sofa, animated in their conversation. "We are agreed?" "We are agreed." They were agreed. "I just know you're going to love it. It's a tremendous opportunity. A child." "A child. I will be able to decorate a nursery for her." Mrs. Foster was already fantasising of patching floral chintzes and pink candlewick bedspreads in one of her guest rooms. Of photographs, Madonna- like, of mother and child, dressed in perfectly tailored costumes, seated on the morning room sofa or the garden bench, to be sent out as Christmas cards. Of parties, with jelly and ice-cream, with Helena the centre of attention, the wise and benevolent matriarch, dispensing love and keeping order amongst a swarm of her friends children - dirty little brats who would be no patch on this, the perfect child. Mrs. Foster did not fantasise of mecha-failures, of shattered illusions and years of eternal childhood for her daughter, as she herself aged and decayed, betrayed by her body while her offspring, not her offspring, stayed forever young. She merely giggled over the champagne that she and Thomas had been saving for a special occasion, and denounced the name "Darlene" as "simply too cruel". They would call their child, their prototype, their first, their unique one, Elizabeth. 


	2. The nursery awaits

Mrs. Foster stood in her hall, waiting to receive her new child. Behind her, lined neatly in the shadows, was the household staff of the Foster residence - Timothy, the gardener, Anna, originally "Annette", the maid - originally French, but now modified to English after an unbearable week (for Mrs. Foster), after the servant's purchase, of clichéd Parisian accents and flighty mannerisms. The cook, marketed under the ludicrous name of "Mrs. Tubbs", but never altered, and a serving man, a wedding gift, years old and the Foster's most ancient mecha retainer, who was, as ever, smartly dressed in a plain white suit. But not tails. After all, tails were vulgar. Only the nouveau riche had serving men with tails, and they called them butlers - an unthinkable faux pas, one that could never possibly happen in the home of such a sophisticate as Mrs. Foster. Mr. Foster's car pulled quietly up to the entrance of the house, and the back door of the low, silver vehicle slid noiselessly back. As Helena's husband, in business suit, wearing his business face, stepped around the bonnet, Helena's child stepped out from the back. She skipped up the steps ahead of Thomas, eyes bright, golden hair neatly plaited and swinging behind the girl, dressed in a pale, blue, nautical sort of costume. Mrs. Foster immediately decided to alter it directly. She entered the hall, and boldly stepped across the gleaming floor towards Helena - standing tall, welcoming, bathed in the afternoon light that streamed through the vast glass entrance doors. "Welcome, Elizabeth!" Helena was benevolent, and sweet, and welcoming, and the child looked up with sweet, unblinking, blue eyes. "Hello, Helena." "I see Thomas has already told you my name." A hint of annoyance to the petulant wife's face, unnoticed by the husband, stripped of his business face, beaming, by the door, behind the child. "Yes." "Well, welcome!" Arms spread wide in motherly embrace, a hug, a watering eye, from she whose eyes could water. The mandatory introductions to the servants. All of them, in their neatly starched uniforms, bowed politely to their young mistress as each, in turn, was referred, by Helena, to her new daughter. The assurance that a bath and turned down bed was ready, if required. The standard scripted hostess talk, from Helena, longing to take her child to the nursery, to a land of white miniature furniture and swirly pink carpet, of tailor made wardrobes and cupboards overflowing with toys positively florescent in their shiny newness. The inevitable whisking away, up the stairs, with Helena smiling, genuinely, truly, for the first time in many months. Thomas watched the pair, his wife, and daughter, as they elegantly and picturesquely mounted the stairs towards the nursery. He was happy. Helena was happy. The whole household, from the master and the mistress to their retinue of servants, beaming with complacent, misunderstanding pride, was happy. 


	3. Helena, Thomas, Elizabeth, Jennifer, and...

Spring, and Elizabeth's arrival, passed. Summer bloomed triumphant, and perished exceptionally early, descending into an premature, sharply cold autumn, much to the delight of Mrs. Foster, who had spent a good deal of the summer months moaning on a shaded daybed. Elizabeth, like the hothouse plants, the bonsai trees, the writing, the quilting, the scrapbooks, had passed. She no longer held any delights for Helena.  
  
Elizabeth played on the floor of her nursery. Around her, fanning outwards in chaotic display, were the sheets of drawing paper with which she had been provided. They coated the rich and luxuriant pink carpets thickly, their garish colours idealistically childlike. Elizabeth wanted to show them to Mummy, yet Mummy had not been in to see her yet. Mummy had not been in for several days. It had been months since Mummy last took care of her, when it was still warm. Since then, Jennifer had been purchased. Elizabeth was not particularly fond of Jennifer, who was rather too apt to cuddle and coddle.  
  
Helena was not too fond of Jennifer. She was not fond of the whole arrangement, truth be told. Earlier that day, at elevenses, she had been talking to Mrs. Hobby. Lovely woman. She'd let her figure go, of course, but so do all older women. Helena had confided to her that she didn't really think mecha children would really work. It had been Mrs. Hobby's opinion from the very beginning that the whole venture was doomed. Mrs. Hobby had asked how they were coping with their model. Helena had confided that theirs wasn't responding so well to its new nursemaid. Mrs. Hobby had replied that her husband's blood pressure had risen since the mecha child business failure. Such a pity, had been Helena's reply. And the same thing had happened to Catherine's husband, the one who had that heart attack during a business meeting last year...  
  
Evening was approaching. Elizabeth had been bathed and bedded by Jennifer, to whom she addressed plaintive questions as to the whereabouts of her Mummy that the new and inexperienced nanny mecha had been unable to answer. Downstairs, Helena and Thomas were enjoying an after-dinner glass of wine, and discussing the problem at hand.  
  
"Of course, the whole thing was flawed from the beginning. Caroline Hobby said as much earlier this morning at my little morning tea. Which went splendidly, by the way. In any case, we can't go on like this. I daresay we were a tad hasty in rushing into parenting it, but we can't be blamed for this." Helena's eyes wore a fierce and persuasive glint that invited her husband to be complacent. "Of course not." His voice was limp, for he was tired, and vaguely depressed to see such an important experiment be irrevocably tainted by his wife's fickle ways. Any chances of promotion were obscure – vice presidency certainly wouldn't be on the cards this year or next. "Not should we be sentenced to a lifetime of this. It's obscene. The thing is not a child, it's a machine. That's the fundamental of it. We can't have it cluttering up the house for evermore. What happens when we need a room handy? When we have a child of our own?" Helena's husband made no reply. "Then we are agreed. Elizabeth will have to be sent back." 


End file.
